What better way to enjoy a new P4EE than with a new
motherboard. The already volatile motherboard market displaced our price
estimates for E7205, i845PE and i850E. Even though the i865PE chipset smokes
just about anything out of the water, its hard to not take a second look at the
already low priced Abit BH7, which was under $70 at time of publishing.

While certainly cost effective, there are better solutions
this week than the BH7. Our recommendation, the Albatron PX865PE Pro was
priced under $95, while other high performing boards like the Abit IS7 were
priced around $100. Don’t forget to check out Evan’s roundup of the 865PE series back in
June.

As much as the 875P motherboards have come down in price,
they still do not justify a buy over the 865PE. As Evan’s roundup pointed out,
you get the same, if not better performance at an excellent cost. This is
really unfortunate for competitor SiS. While the budget conscious 648FX
chipset debuted with an almost interesting splash, one really has to question
what SiS is doing for their market. The SiS 648FX chipset is not bad, but
would the owner of an already expensive 800FSB P4 buy a single channel
motherboard to save (at most) $15?

Let us also consider Intel’s new chipset, the 848P. As
Evan’s review of the ASUS
P4P800S-E review showed, the 848P chipset is just an 864PE with one memory
channel disabled. While we do not know the price points on the motherboard
yet, in the upcoming weeks we would not be surprised if there are some boards
priced better than SiS 648FX solutions. Unless SiS decides to bring something
new to the table, and fast, they are sitting ducks.

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17 Comments

Kristopher, #16 again. These quotes were taken from the original AnandTech reviews of nForce2 technology.

"Remember the 12% boost in bandwidth we saw on the nForce2 by going to DDR400? That 12% increase in bandwidth comes at the cost of a 22% increase in latency! The increase in latency is not only due to the slower memory timings DDR400 modules run at but also because the memory bus is no longer synchronous with the FSB when running in DDR400 mode whereas DDR333 matches up perfectly with the new 333MHz Athlon XP FSB."

"There's no increase in latency when going from a single channel DDR333 to a dual channel DDR333 setup on the nForce2 platform. There is a slight increase when making the same transition with DDR400 because we had to increase some of the timing delays in order to run two channels of DDR400 with the nForce2 while maintaining stability."

"As we proved in our original review of the nForce chipset, the bandwidth gained from going to dual channel DDR doesn't help unless you're sharing main memory bandwidth with an integrated GPU. In this case we're not and we'll be focusing on IGP performance in a later article, so we can disregard the two 128-bit nForce2 solutions for the rest of this comparison. We also have a balanced FSB/memory bus setup, meaning we have as much bandwidth going to our CPU as we do to main memory, so increasing memory bandwidth without similarly increasing FSB bandwidth would inherently yield poor returns as we're FSB limited at that point."

Thus, unless the board is capable of running dual-channel in full synchronous mode at 400MHz+ at tight timings, there does not seem to be any advantage. And then again, how many boards that can do this fall into the "half dozen $80 nForce2 motherboards" category?Reply

#5 I want to know that myself. I'm holding off strickly to buy the 9800XT as soon as it's released, but it's getting tough to hold off. I'm dying for information about this card and scour the net daily now looking for new info.Reply